Anchoring the Reader in the Collapsing Ship of Time, or The Genius of the Transition.

Dear folks,

1)    This is HELLA long. I’m sorry.

2)    That is because there is a LOT to explore here.

3)    So much so that I am trying to focus on one specific element.

4)    But even in doing this I am getting distracted.

5)    Here goes…

The genius of Bechdel’s Fun Home I would argue rests firmly in her mastery over the art of transition.

I am going to analyze part of Chapter 5 to demonstrate what Bechdel is doing with transitions – from start to finish throughout this entire graphic memoir with (in some places brief) reference to other moments within the text where she is applying these same methods.

Bechdel opens each chapter with a declarative statement that recollects the story that she has been drawing, reminding us of where we have been, and the clues we have been offered to piece together the truth of her father’s story, and the truth of her own story. These declarative statements also function as clues and questions that unfold throughout the chapters, offering ever-deepening reflections and understandings of the story, as she herself discovers it.

Chapter 5 opens with Bechdel stating “I have suggested that my father killed himself, but it’s just as accurate to say that he died gardening. He’d been clearing brush from the yard of an old farmhouse he was planning to restore.” (89)

Bam. In these two sentences:

• We are (still) firmly fixed on her father’s death.

• We are reminded of her father’s preoccupation with and need for tight control over appearances, the restoration of “dead things,” and these as symptoms of the artifice and dualism with(in) which he lived; his “preference of a fiction to reality.” (85)

• We learn something new about him, his affinity for botanical endeavors, which extends the previous constructions of his character, and which quickly opens into an evaluation of how Bechdel’s father performed his sexuality and the way in which he utilized artifice to obscure it.

What Bechdel demonstrates here in this short space is her circular approach to storytelling. I explore in greater detail below how transitions assist this.

On page 92, Bechdel re-introduces us to Proust’s writings and elements of his personal story. She reminds us that as she earlier mentioned Proust in the text, “My father, as I say, had begun reading this [The Remembrance of Things Past] the year before he died.” (Another example of circling back.)

The writing of Proust in this chapter, (as the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, in Chapter 1, Camus’ A Happy Death and the Myth of Sisyphus, and the Adams Family in Chapter 2, works by Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, James and Wallace in Chapter 4, and on) is introduced as an allegory that serves as the focal point around and against which Bechdel’s narrative of her father’s story, and her own, are unwoven, unveiled, and reconstructed throughout the rest of chapter. In this sense, Proust in this chapter (as other elements of popular culture, literature, philosophy, historical events, or mythology in other chapters) is established as a thematic anchor to which we return time and again. Using this technique, Bechdel is able to weave the reader through time and across events while suturing together what would otherwise be vast confusing gaps in story, neatly fortifying each jump with emphasis on the major theme of exploration.

Right so back to analysis…

On page 92, Bechdel writes, “If my father had a favorite flower, it was the Lilac. A tragic botanical specimen invariably beginning to fade even before reaching its peak.”

Quoting Proust on the Lilac she writes: “only a week before they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, these were now spent and shriveled and discolored, a hollow scum, dry and scentless.” (92) Placing this description in contrast to her own father’s preference for the Lilac, Bechdel foreshadows the way in which her father’s stories would quickly fall apart. She utilizes Proust to open the discussion on her father’s passion for gardening as an exploration of his sexuality. “After the Lilac passage, Proust describes Swann’s garden in a feat of both literary and horticultural virtuosity that climaxes in the narrator’s rapturous communion with the pink blossom of the Hawthorn Hedge.” (93) Most literally introducing the way in which the garden became a site of seduction for her father. Then writing, “If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.” (93)

Transition: “Proust would have intense emotional friendships with fashionable women… but it was with young often straight men with whom he fell in love.”

Bechdel uses Proust as a foil by depicting below the narration visual interactions with Roy, one of his young male lovers.

Using the device of the garden Bechdel opens up from pages 94 – 96 an exploration of how her father “cultivated these young men like orchids” tying this into an conversation on the way in which gender played out within her family, with focus on her father’s masculinity and his enforcement of particular forms of femininity onto her. With great zooming in on specific detailed incidents ie. the barrette Bechel demonstrates that “despite the tyrannical power with which he held sway, it was clear to me that my father was a big sissy.”

Then page 97 Bechdel brings us back to Proust, this time to zoom out quickly and offer us a more universal analysis of what was happening between father and daughter. “Proust refers to his explicitly homosexual characters as “inverts”… As a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex… In the admittedly limited sample comprising my father and me, perhaps it is sufficient.”

And with this statement she circles back to the theme and then jumps us “five years later” continuing the exploration of the way in which she and her father were “inversions of one another.” Again in the next panel jumping us “seven years after that” to another moment reinforcing this dynamic where her father says “You can’t go out to dinner like that. You look like a missionary.” What is holding us together through these transitions is adherence to the theme. And within each of these transitions something new about the dynamic between father and daughter is being revealed.

On page 99 Bechdel writes about the “slender demilitarized zone” that existed between herself and her father, during her years as a teenager, their “shared reverence for masculine beauty.” The last two panels on this page depict Bechdel holding a magazine with an image of a man, chest bare, reclining.

Using a similar image the next two pages are a "centerfold" of sorts that circle back to where we have just been in the magazine, while transitioning us again in time to just after her father’s death. In this panel Bechdel has discovered a nearly nude photo of Roy (her babysitter/the garden hand) taken by her father. In exploration of this photo Bechdel introduces the vacation that they went on with Roy to NYC when she was 8 (foreshadowing the next transition). Bechdel notices the way in which the year is blotted out of this photo writing:

“In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.” (101) In this statement Bechdel both forming an analysis of her father’s actions and is circling us back to Proust who we reencounter on the following page, poignantly with the quote, “the two ways are revealed to converge – to have always converged – through a vast network of transversals.”

Bechdel then ingeniously utilizes this quote and transitions us to the trip to NYC she has introduced in the “centerfold” via a literal "network of transversals," an under river highway tunnel.

In the following pages Bechdel does the following:

1)    Introduces us to Bleeker Street where her mother lived in NYC hearkening back to her parents young adulthood

2)    Takes us on a walk through NYC with Roy

3)    Notices frenetic energy in the air in NYC and traces that to Stonewall

*Illuminating the theme of sexuality (both her’s and her father’s)

4)    Rounds us back to Proust in this meditation on NYC and her parents young adulthood wondering what had attracted her father to her mother “Had he somehow conflated her with her address like Proust’s narrator had with Gilberte and the garden? and we reconnect with our anchor

5)    Then circles us back to her mother’s NYC apartment

6)    Which opens into Bechdel’s own stay in New York post graduation from university

7)    Introducing historical information on lesbian culture in the 1950s

8)    Circling us back now to her father’s sexual deviation as she wonders what she would have done as a “Eisenhower-era butch… Would I have married and sought succor from my high school students?”

9)    Which lands us back in Bechdel’s 12 year-old body sitting at the table with her father reflecting on his copy of Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe the name of which eventually was translated to Within a Budding Grove which “shifts the emphasis from the erotic to the botanical. But of course as proust himself so lavishly illustrates eros and botany are pretty much the same thing” (109). As was the case with her father - which is where we started this whole chapter.

10) And I’ll leave it here where Bechdel depicts her father reading a gardening magazine “Wayside Gardens” and then capitalizes on the word budding to introduce her own sexual maturation.

There is so much more to say, but here’s the point of everything I’m writing.

1)    In using literary examples (ie. in chapter 3) as allegories for her family’s stories, Bechdel is able to collapse time and information. This strategy permits her to place emphasis on only the most vital details of her family’s stories allowing readers to fill in the details while riding the allegories and allowing her to hone in keenly on the focus she wants us to keep our eyes on. This strategy successfully constructs an intricately dynamic world enveloping and holding the reader.

2)    Her use of transitions establishing narrator authority. Bechdel offers these anchors up as the familiar ground to which we as readers return. Bechdel always reminds us where we have started from and explodes our world open from there. As a result the reader is effortlessly drawn from one rounding corner to the next and she is able to drive the story in different directions with such specific detail and commitment to theme it boggles the mind.

3)    Lastly, and in commitment to her (I think ultimate) theme of recovery, through these strategies Bechdel is constantly pointing our attention towards the way in which everything, every story is interwoven – in the way it builds up artifice and in the way that artifice crumbles. In her economy of writing, no stories sit independent of one another but rather each illuminate the other, the hidden and unspoken, until the light is so bright we can barely see. Bechdel in her use of transitions succeeds in creating a matrix around the reader so engaging, that we do not stop to question the untold pieces – the world is drawn with such fullness.

Ok I hope my point carried.

Looking forward to the conversation.